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Lori Merish, Barry Shank. A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture.(Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 328. $50.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 1, February 2008, Pages 183–184, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.1.183
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This book by Barry Shank directs substantial intellectual firepower at one of the most devalued forms of American popular culture: greeting cards. Tying business history to American culture's “dominant forms of subjectivity” (p. 3), the book is an impressive work of materialist cultural studies scholarship. Shank reveals the power of the economy “to structure and partially determine the most private, internal and intimate of feelings”; at the same time, he demonstrates how “feelings of love and affiliation” affect “systems of material production” (p. 4). Taking seriously one Hallmark executive's boast in 1971 that while, in any given day, few Americans may read a book, twenty-five million will send a greeting card, Shank foregrounds the cultural importance of greeting cards, arguing that they illuminate what Raymond Williams terms “the ‘structures of feeling’ produced as modern capitalism evolved into the forms we live among now” (p. 3).
Chapters one and two examine the first commercially produced greeting cards in the United States—Valentines and Christmas cards—which emerged in the 1840s and grew in popularity during the postbellum decades. Drawing on the abundant critical literature on antebellum sentimentalism, Shank argues in chapter one that commercial valentines were important “quasi-public expressive objects in the culture of sentimentalism” (p. 41). The primary “ideological achievement” of that culture, Shank contends, was the “construction of an authentic interior self” seemingly independent of market forces but in fact ideologically central to their operation. Claiming that the public display of “an interior self” constituted “the most important evidence” of “certain forms of class-bound agency and autonomy,” Shank sees commercial valentines as establishing the emotional interiority and eloquence of sender and recipient. Shank pays special attention to the popular genre of comic valentines, in which the deficiencies of lower-class figures were mockingly displayed, which clearly delineated the class parameters of sentimental subjectivity.
